Monthly Archives: April 2013

by Mark R. Waser (originally appeared April 24, 2013 at Transhumanity.Net)

George Dvorsky posted You’ll Probably Never Upload Your Mind Into A Computer in the “DEBUNKERY” section of io9 stating “Here are eight reasons why your brain may never be digitized.” The first problem, of course, is that mind and brain are two different things – as different as a software program and the computer it is running on. The second problem is that he then pulls in yet more confusion with “consciousness uploads” and “transfer our conscious thoughts to a computer”.

Ben Goertzel

George Dvorsky

Ben Goertzel then weighed in with Goertzel Contra Dvorsky on Mind Uploading. Ben states that he prefers Randal Koene’s phrase “substrate independent minds” as less sexy but less misleading – but then goes on to state that “the point is the liberation of the mind from any particular substrate.”

Since we’ve never decoded an entire human value system, we don’t know what values to give an AI. We don’t know what wish to make. If we create superhuman AI tomorrow, we can only give it a disastrously incomplete value system, and then it will go on to do things we don’t want, because it will be doing what we wished for instead of what we wanted.